Even if it's tearing it apart and repurposing the guts for a frisbee, I'm looking for ideas.
With that mindset, I got their software running on my desktop and started to contribute. I quickly realized that they did not want the community to participate in development of their core platform, as evidenced by the fact that it took them weeks to pull requests that fixed very basic bugs. In a very short time, their demonstrated apathy destroyed my interest in contributing any further.
I received unit almost five years later, after a complete redesign. I have moved onto other projects and the whole project has left a bad taste in my mouth. As a result, my unit is presently up for auction on eBay, but I might be stuck with it.
If that turns out to be the case, I will look into donating it to a developer working on another open source voice assistant project. Nominations for that potential recipient would be welcome.
Speaking as a veteran embedded engineer, I think their biggest mistake was outsourcing the building of their hardware. At the very least, they probably would have saved money had they have hired an experienced in-house team.
Regardless, I think they should have focused solely on the software and enabled others to put the stack on custom hardware. I can’t imagine how much money they pissed away on the hardware, while the basic stack still needed gross improvement. They spread themselves too thin by being jacks-of-all-trades, so they were masters of none.
$500 buys an M1 Mac mini btw.
